Progress with peer-to-peer learning in Landcare

It’s reporting time for the CLEA project, a 3 year Victorian Landcare Council project funded by the Natural Resources Conservation League and the VLC. The task is to find ways to support peer learning and mentoring between grassroots environment groups, specifically around what it takes to organise community action, collaborate with partners, and influence decision makers. The social knowledge in Landcare drives its contribution and its evolution in communities.

At the end of Year 2, the NRCL asked us “to reflect on what your group has learnt in regard to building capacity” and “any changes you have made/will make to the project as a result”. Hmmm – now that’s a good invitation! Here are three lessons from the year.

Lesson #1.  Landcare Network Committees of Management need on-going support to become nodes of peer learning

CLEA’s strategy has been to develop CoMs as nodes of peer learning within a network of Landcare peers across the State. Progress is slow, because it is fitted in around short-term business, and the sometimes irregular meetings of CoMs. Even when there is strong commitment to addressing a Question Without Easy Answers, Coordinators still need discussion with CLEA to talk about what has happened and what they need to do next. They need support and a nudge to keep moving.

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Mid Loddon Landcare Network Committee of Management

Lesson #2.  Capacity building around organising, collaborating and influencing is constrained by: a) the old imaginary of Landcare as planting trees; b) weak institutional support for social knowledge in natural resource management; and c) the isolation of the social innovators in Landcare

See here for more on these constraints. The implication is that it’s absolutely critical to connect the social innovators in Landcare – the people who are remaking Landcare, small piece by small piece, in the face of long-term shifts in the social and political context.

Lesson #3.  Use what’s there, don’t build from scratch

In Year 1, CLEA decided to focus on Landcare Network CoMs as a place for peer-to-peer learning, because they are peers talking to each other, regularly. No need to invent new meetings – just use what’s there. This year, research with VLC delegates showed that there are people already connecting those who want support and expertise with those who can give it. We called them Network Builders. We need to cooperate across levels of governance to support those Network Builders. What they will do is move knowledge and make support available, when and where it’s needed.

Year 2 has also brought the painful realisation that not many people read this blog (!), and that it is smarter to find ways to use established communication channels than to set up a new one and try to pull people to it.

Many people speaking out

Working out the first experiments for CLEA, a network supporting peer learning and mentoring for community environmental action, I have decided that I can’t do it on my own.

Not news to anyone else, but when you’re engaged as a consultant, and have already generated lots of ideas for a project, it’s easy to get carried away assuming that you have to do it on your own – while knowing that you can’t and dreading the grind of doing it on your own!

This project will create a platform for talk between Landcare volunteers and staff about organising, collaborating and influencing. It’s a place to talk about the social side of Landcare, and it’s on the social side of organising local action and forming alliances between players in the NRM space that Landcare excels. The Victorian Landcare Council, which is sponsoring CLEA, wants to add to that mix greater facility in influencing decision makers, specifically politicians and the urban electorate, where Landcare can no longer assume support.

Two people talking at Wimmera small (800x534)

It’s all in the conversations

How to do support such a network? Not by rushing around collecting stories and pumping them out, but by giving those who already speak out in the Landcare community simple tools and a platform for doing so, from many points in the landscape. And alongside the tools for telling your story and expressing your opinion, the tools for building an audience. A gentle nurturing of the community of practice, between the over-committed. It’s all in the conversations – though I can’t say that now without a wince, after Rob Sitch’s “Utopia”.

So I’ve put out a call for help with developing my own digital toolkit, taking myself as a somewhat represesentative sample of such Landcare persons. I need, for example, to ramp up my own mail lists – I’ve been much influenced by Brett de Hoedt’s post on the power of email.

If you want to join in, drop me a line ross.colliver@bigpond.com

Building up from the grassroots

Landscape scale projects are a high priority for funders in natural resource management (NRM), and a big opportunity for the federations of local Landcare groups known as Landcare Networks. Since around 1995, local groups with a sense of affiliation based on geography, agricultural systems and social community have been organising themselves into Landcare Networks. Here, they go beyond their local affiliation and think and operate in terms of the large landcape.

Landcare networks are a way to integrate goals and action between community groups, agencies and industry. Asked to help Landcare groups in the Mornington Peninsula as they formed a network, I went back to material from a forum I convened a few years ago asking Landcare staff and community leaders to share what they found supported success in forming a network. Here are the conclusions they drew:

Starting small is the only way you can start. The presenters were from strong, established Networks. When you’re just starting out to build a Network, it’s easy to feel over-awed by established Networks. But every Network starts small, and builds up the commitment of landholders and partners organisations slowly, by doing what Landcare is good at – showing through action what can be done.

Success brings partners on board.  When you’ve got something going at community level, agencies want to back you. You’ll have to put your work in front of them, but don’t assume they won’t be interested. Local government, CMAs and agencies like DEPI are on the look out for projects that have community support. If your project can help them get their job done, and make them look good, then they are interested.

Landcare has vital connections at local level. Landcare has credibility with landholders and good social networks. That credibility multiplies when a Landcare Network links local groups. Landcare staff and management know their communities. When setting up a project, they know who is onside already, who might be interested and who is not interested at all. That’s social knowledge. Put this knowledge to the foreground when negotiating with funders that want results on the ground but don’t have those networks.

 Get your planning tight. Government agencies are all about planning, and corporate sponsors want to support people who know what they are doing. Develop your own planning processes so you can give a clear argument for your priorities and show how plans can be translated into action on the ground. Landcare has always been good at action on the ground, but you need systems for planning.

 Get close to your partners and potential funders. They like personal attention as much as you. They expect ask for your plans and funding bids, but make it personal and talk to them. Once you’ve got a project going, keep talking to them.

Diversify your funding sources. Don’t wait for a miracle. Open up relationships with different agencies and sponsors. Be prepared to put the time in getting to know them and them getting to know you. Don’t expect immediate results.

 Stay close to your community members. The community is your foundation. If you haven’t got them there with you, sooner or later, projects will fall over. Your members have to understand your goals and believe in them as much as you do. If that means pulling back a bit on some of your wilder ideas, then pull back. Talk more at local level. Wait till the time is right. Work with the interest that’s there.

 

Community-based governance in social-ecological systems

Community-based governance in social-ecological systems: An inquiry into the marginalisation of Landcare in Victoria, Australia, 2006-10<spaån lang=”EN-US”>. PhD, 2011.  Using action research, peer groups of staff and members of management committees of Landcare Networks met to improve their effectiveness and influence in landscape change. Initial meetings identified a breakdown in collaboration with government NRM planners and programs, in particular with CMAs. Participants developed a critique of this situation, and initiated stronger advocacy and some activism on behalf of community interests. This change is theorised as a process of reframing within a community of practice, in which doubt leads to examination of failure and a search for more effective action. Analysis also developed a description of Landcare Network governance practice as supporting relationships of mutual responsibility that will maintain
the momentum of change across the social-ecological system.

I have the thesis here for download